Wilful Impropriety (13 page)

They hurried downstairs to a bar called Mamma Ri’s, where Oesterlische called for whiskey. Marinus called for absinthe, lighting the lump of sugar atop the silver spoon with a small snap of his fingers. After downing one or two of these sorcerous concoctions, Marinus became far more pliable and easy to work with.

“Tell me you have the scroll,” Oesterlische pleaded.

“I regret to say it was taken from me.”

Oesterlische swore. “Are you, or are you not, a mighty warlock? How does it happen that a bunch of hooligans from the docks are able to wrest a master of eternity’s great mysteries from his own hearth and home?”

“Peter, I am a
corporate
warlock,” Marinus hiccuped. “I scry competitive motives and polish up magic for rollouts. I do not specialize in martial sorcery of any sort. If you wanted
that
kind of magic, you should have looked up someone like Bob Ghent.”

“Who?”

“Bob Ghent. You met him. He was at my office when you came by the other day.”

Oesterlische searched his memory, to no avail.

“Mousy chap, unassuming . . .” Marinus offered. “He was hiding behind a potted palm when you came in.”

“Oh,
him
,” Oesterlische said. “He reminded me of a bowl of cold oatmeal.”

“Yes, he gets that a lot,” Marinus said. “He’s a salamander.”

“A what now?”

“A salamander. He changes color and spits fire. All the things that a salamander does. It’s his specialty. It’s more useful than it sounds, I assure you.”

Oesterlische pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, briefly attempting to ascertain how cold oatmeal, firespitting, and salamanders had entered the conversation.

Marinus must not have noticed this action, for he pressed on blithely: “He’s really quite an angry little warlock underneath that cold-oatmeal exterior,” he said thoughtfully. “But he keeps it all inside, under careful control, and uses it to send forth flaming jets of doom upon malefactors of all stripes. Terrible for his digestion, as you might imagine.”

Marinus frowned at the bartender for being quite so far down the bar, gestured to the man impatiently. “I was going to hire him to talk to some clients who’ve left their bills go too long. His talents really are spectacular.”

“Leaving aside Bob Ghent and his amazing fire-spewing talents,” Oesterlische gently attempted to return the conversation to his own particular set of digestion-disturbing troubles, “How the hell am I going to get my scroll back?”

“I don’t know, but I can tell you it’s one amazing magical artifact. I didn’t get as far in taking it apart as I would have liked, but there was a lot of language about love and promises and faithfulness and those separated coming close. The words ‘betrothal’ and ‘beloved’ occurred quite frequently.”

“Aha!” Oesterlische lifted a finger. “Then
that
was why Boston!”

Marinus looked at him quizzically.

“Was that a sentence, or have you lost the capacity for rational speech?”

“Miss Wildish—you know her, Artemus Q. Wildish’s daughter?”

“Thirty million, right?”

“Thirty million. I’m
this
close to announcing our engagement.” Oesterlische pinched the air to indicate the closeness of his expected betrothal. “She was visiting Boston the day that Nussbaum took me there. Remember how Nussbaum said that he always traveled to random places? We must have traveled to Boston that day because my almost-fiancée was there!”

Marinus nodded thoughtfully.

“That would be consistent with what I was able to discover of the scroll,” he said. A look of worry came over his face. “But, old friend, your mention of Miss Wildish does bring up another point. A rather disturbing point. When I was down on the wharves, or the warehouses, or whatever grimy hole they threw me in, I saw someone. Someone you know.”

Cold foreboding washed over Oesterlische.

“Who?”

“Miss Wildish.”

“Miss Winifred Wildish? My almost-fiancée, Miss Wildish?”

Marinus nodded soberly.

“She was speaking quite forcefully to the men who were my captors. She was screaming loudly at them, saying that they were a bunch of low cads. She asked . . . no, rather
demanded
. . . that they return the scroll immediately, and that she certainly would not allow you or her father to pay a $50,000 ransom because you were such a wise, loving, decent, hard-working man and it was shameful that they would do something like this to you. She said she betted you’d come for her, and then they’d pay for what they’d done, double quick. While she was berating them, the thug who’d been guarding me went over to watch. He was highly amused by her high-pitched antics. Given that he was thus distracted, I took the opportunity to slip out.”

“And you didn’t take her with you?” Oesterlische fairly screamed.

“Once again, you’ve confused me with someone possessed of derring-do. But I remember where they are.”

“They will have moved once they found you gone,” Oesterlische said.

And once they found you gone, they certainly kept their hands on another captive
, he thought, looking glumly into the bottom of his glass. Visions of $30 million fortunes in the dirty grabbing arms of desperate men danced before his eyes.

This was getting serious.

Marinus snapped his fingers, contemplated the little tongue of flame he made dance there. He touched it to the sugar cube on his fresh glass of absinthe. “I tell you one thing. If those ruffians had been unfortunate enough to grab
Bob Ghent
in my place, your almost-fiancée would be as good as rescued. He would have barbecued the lot of them, and stayed for lunch after.”

Oesterlische sighed. His fingers went to his coat pocket to the $50,000 check that repined there. And of course that was just the amount of the ransom they wanted, the damn dirty scoundrels. He could get the scroll back, but it would leave him with no money to get the ball rolling.

“Yep,” Marinus said, sipping his absinthe. “Ol’ Bob Ghent. He’s just the man for this kind of show. Breathes fire, you know.”

Oesterlische snapped his fingers.

“Marinus, old chum!” Oesterlische slapped the warlock on the shoulder, making him choke on his absinthe. “I believe you’ve given me an idea!”

•   •   •

Oesterlische didn’t get home until much later, where he found Nussbaum waiting for him in the entryway of his family’s house. His mother had apparently let young Nussbaum sit there for quite a long time.

“Well, you sure have done a peach of a job handling this,” he greeted Oesterlische, a greeting which Oesterlische took rather hard, given all that he’d already been through that day. “By the way, who is Miss Wildish?”

“My almost-fiancée,” Oesterlische invited Nussbaum into the parlor and poured him a shot of whiskey from a locked cabinet. “Why do you ask?”

“The Black Hand sent a ransom note to her father, and she somehow managed to intercept it, and now they’ve got her
and
the scroll locked up somewhere.” Nussbaum shook his head. “They’re going to send another ransom note tonight, if we don’t go down and get her first.”

“We certainly can’t let them do that,” Oesterlische said. “Otherwise the jig will be up and old man Wildish will know that I’ve lost the scroll with which I promised to make him millions of dollars.”

“Then I guess we just have to go down and get her,” Nussbaum said, fiercely. “And
my
scroll.”

“How are we supposed to get her? We don’t even know where she is!”

“I’ve been given directions,” Nussbaum said darkly. “I met with some shady gentlemen. I told them I represented her father, and that he’d sent me down to deal with them. They told me that they’d hand her over, and the scroll too, for the $50,000 Wildish gave you. You have the cash?”

Oesterlische felt a spasm of possessiveness. “It’s Wildish’s cash.”

“You think he wouldn’t want us to spend that money to get his daughter back? And
my
scroll?”

“Can we trust them?” Oesterlische said. Nussbaum looked at him. Actually, he didn’t so much look at him as
give
him a look.

“Oh yeah,
sure
we can trust them,” Nussbaum said. “They’re completely trustworthy. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They’re the picture of respectability, the apex of integrity, the . . .”

“Shut up,” Oesterlische said. Oesterlische rubbed his chin. He was still thinking long and hard when his mother bustled in, making a point of ignoring Nussbaum’s existence entirely. She had Winifred’s fat pink letter between her fingers, where, Oesterlische had no doubt, it had been the recipient of her close scrutiny all day.

“Peter!” she said. “The note from Miss Wildish!”

“Yes, Mother,” Oesterlische said wearily, taking it from her and tucking it into his pocket.

“Such a nice young lady,” his mother sighed, starry-eyed. “Her family has money, I believe.”

“Yes, Mother,” Oesterlische said again, taking her shoulders and steering her out of the room. As he closed the door behind her, he looked at Nussbaum.

“All right,” he said. “For Winifred. And
our
scroll.”

•   •   •

Assembling $50,000 in cash was quite a feat, especially as it was past three o’clock and all the banks were getting ready to close. Luckily, though, Oesterlische knew one of the clerks at the First National, a rosy young blonde with dimpled elbows, and she smoothed the process in exchange for a tickle under the chin and a promise to take her out to a show the next weekend. He whispered a suggestion in her ear about what they might do after the show that made her giggle and blush.

“I thought you had an almost-fiancée,” Nussbaum said coolly, as they left the bank with a large suitcase full of cash.

“Oh, I admire her tremendously, and I do intend to marry her.” Oesterlische said. “But really, she’s just
business
.”

“You don’t say,” Nussbaum’s eyes narrowed. “And does she know that she’s just business?”

Oesterlische pressed his lips together. Of course she didn’t know. Why on earth would he go around telling her something like that?

“What difference does it make?” he decided avoiding the question was the best route, given that Nussbaum seemed to be on the verge of breaking out in persnickitude once again.

“I should think it might make a lot of difference to her,” Nussbaum said, persnickifying as expected. But he said nothing further.

The appointed time for the meeting was midnight, and the young men passed the cold afternoon and evening fortifying themselves with whiskey and nervous boasting about each one’s pugilistic skill, and how each intended to employ it if things got rough. At eleven, they began their walk down to the appointed meeting place, a warehouse on the wharves along Fulton Street. As they walked, Oesterlische took deep gulps of cold air to clear the whiskey and bravado from his blood, but Nussbaum strode forward with confidence, like a dog looking forward to a romp in the park. Oesterlische watched him with amazement.

“I say, Nussbaum. Aren’t you the least bit worried by the fact that we’re walking around the wharves at midnight with $50,000 in cash? That doesn’t give you the slightest turn?” He tapped his chest. “You know, right here?”

“They know we’re here,” Nussbaum said, after a moment’s thought. He glanced at the suitcase full of cash in Oesterlische’s hand. “No one’s going to take the money from us. It’s Black Hand money now. If anyone stole it, they’d have to answer to the Black Hand. Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”

Oesterlische tightened his grip on the suitcase and wished he could believe that.

The warehouse was a dark and brooding building that stood out over the East River on spindly stilts. The sign above the door read
Schumann’s Condiments and Fine Comestibles
but it didn’t seem that Schumann had made a very successful go of things—there was a “For Lease” sign hanging in the office window. They cracked the door open, peered into the darkness. It smelled of musty wood and old vinegar, but Oesterlische had little time to notice anything other than Winifred, lying in the middle of the warehouse’s vast empty floor, bound, gagged, and struggling.

As he hurried toward her, he noticed that she was not alone. Two men in shabby overcoats stood behind her, their faces hidden by loose hoods with ragged eyeholes. Both men held revolvers, and these were pointed straight at Oesterlische and Nussbaum. The thugs, seeing Oesterlische and Nussbaum moving toward them, gestured menacingly.

“Stop right there,” one of them said in a low voice. “Drop the cash, then we’ll give you the girl.”

“And the scroll!” Nussbaum added, coming to an abrupt halt behind Oesterlische.

Setting down the money, Oesterlische took two steps backward. One of the men rushed forward, knelt down, unbuckled the suitcase’s leather straps. He ran his fingers over the greenbacks, nodded back to his thuggish compatriot. His thuggish compatriot stuffed a rolled vellum into Winifred’s hands. Then he cut the ropes that bound her. As the ropes fell to the floor around her, she ran into Oesterlische’s arms.

“Oh, Peter!” she breathed. But Oesterlische did not look at her. Eyes narrowed, he watched the filthy thug paw over the $50,000 in the suitcase. He watched the man close the suitcase, buckle its leather straps. Then he nodded.